The Exchanges

Q So maybe, maybe we just even start from the beginning. Um, and how it came back to Rivet. So, how did you start your career, and what was the path to thinking about founding your own company?

A You know, I've been lucky enough to work with founders sort of since day one. Um, I started my career at Product Hunt. My first real job was working at my mom's restaurant. Um, but my first tech job was at Product Hunt. Uh, Neve Drawer recruited me to work on Twitter. Said, we need a guy to do our Twitter. You seem to enjoy Twitter. Here, have fun. And, um, I was really lucky to get to work with him. I was an intern. I eventually joined Product Hunt full time. I was the first hire after AngelList acquired Product Hunt. So, I was the new face in the office, in the AngelList office, alongside the rest of the Product Hunt team. I was there for two years. Um, I got to work across all of our social channels, our newsletter, I wrote that for a year. The AngelList newsletter, that was a really fun one to write. Uh, as well as some of our sort of like early, uh, SaaS platforms that we sold at Product Hunt. One was called Ship. I got to work on that. That was, that was really fun. Um, Nev and Ryan were sort of the beginnings of my career. I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today without them. Um, so I spent two years there. I eventually ended up in venture, uh, working with Niamh at his venture fund called Truck Capital. I was there for fund two. Uh, fund two was a fifteen million dollar fund. He's now on to fund four, which is, you know, very exciting. Um, I was there for fund two.…

AI assessment note: “I started my career at Product Hunt. My first real job was working at my mom's restaurant.”

Q being announced and new deals that are happening. So from your perspective, having worked in FinTech for a while and now starting a new FinTech company, what was your experience being on the inside of that? Like, did you even feel it? Do you feel it in the market when you're talking to your friends that are founders or working at other FinTech companies? Um, what's the big difference there?

A The market is rewarding companies that have built a real business. There are a lot of FinTech companies that Unfortunately, never got there. I am sure they went in with great ideals that went in with, you know, real plans to get there, but either something in the product didn't work or something on the way that they make revenue didn't work and, and they explode oftentimes spectacularly on the backend or they languish. You don't hear about them for 10 years. Then they, you know, quietly get acquired. Um, But, you know, from where I was sitting ramp, we, you know, the, the impacts we have for businesses were real, right? You know, tens of millions of dollars saved, uh, tens of millions of dollars in cashback unlocked, all of the time-saving features that the finance teams loved that picked ramp over, you know, one of the handful of competitors that would pop up, um, meant that there was a real business being built. Um, ramp plus just came out, maybe, oh God, just came out. It feels like just yesterday. It's a year ago now, probably. Um, but it was a, you know, paid platform, you know, a handful of features that were, that are gated off, uh, that are paid no longer free. And the clients that are using them and paying for them and engaging with them deeply love them. They solve real need for them. These are oftentimes many thousands of dollars a year engagements. Um, People love t…

AI assessment note: “The market is rewarding companies that have built a real business.”

Q right channels and converting that, um, Like, I'm thinking in terms of you're recruiting someone, you're, you're looking to bring someone onto your team, maybe you're an early stage company, maybe you just recently raised, um, and you want to start turning the dials on growth. How do you start, um, validating whether or not, like, these, this is the right talent to bring in to start moving the needle?

A Yeah, and, and I'll just start off, you have to know what number you want to move first, right? Um, it is not a good idea to hire a growth person if you don't know what number they're going to move. And if you hire a killer, and they show up, and they say, what number I'm moving, and you go, oh, just, just do growth stuff. Just, just do things that look like growth. We'll figure it out later. They're going to lose their mind. Um, you need to give them the number that they need to move, and it's best if that number is not a number that they can change in a spreadsheet. It's a number that exists in a dashboard. It's something that is undeniably the number that it is. Revenue, customer count, website visitors, what have you. Um, the closer it is to the true, you know, north star of the business, even better. Um, growth people make numbers go up. That does not mean they're immune to, um, making the number go up and not actually having the impact you want it to have. Oh yeah, your web traffic's up. Well, it's all terrible traffic didn't convert, but hey, I made the number go up, right? You have to give them a real number that matters to the business. Um, every quarter ramp, we would pick our goals, right? And every person on the team owned a single number. It's very difficult when multiple people own the same number. It's very difficult when one person is owning multiple numbers and…

AI assessment note: “you have to know what number you want to move first”

Q Well, I love Rivet. I think that was a great choice. Um, it certainly is a good way to encapsulate strong taxes, you know. In terms of working at startups before, you've probably laid out what your goals will be, the milestones that you want to achieve. You've had really good growth marketing experience. What are your long-term goals Having worked in startups before?

A I mean, I, I think the long-term goal of this is to build an amazing tax prep firm, right? Um, Ernst & Young is who I look up to. It's not, you know, there are a bunch of startup focused tax prep firms. We are not building one. We are building a better tax prep firm. Just so happens that a lot of our sort of early customers happen to be startups. Um, Ernst & Young is the goal. They do, what, 30, thirty, five billion dollars a year in revenue. Billion dollars a year in revenue. Most of that is audit. Uh, we're only focused on tax, but still it's, it's in the billions. There's The big four, there's four of these along with hundreds, if not thousands of smaller tax prep firms that are doing anywhere between a million dollars a year and a hundred million a year, right? This is a massively fragmented industry. It's largely owned by, you know, accountants themselves who started their own firms and grew it slowly over, you know, two decades and are ready to retire. Um, private equity firms are getting involved now to roll them up. That's really interesting to me. Um, there's people talking about offshoring a lot of these sort of roles to overseas. Um, It's, it's, it's the, the industry is changing really rapidly. And, um, you know, we're, it's, it's fun. Uh, it's, it's fun to be able to build something that people need, uh, and, and, and want to build a relationship with for, for a de…

AI assessment note: “the long-term goal of this is to build an amazing tax prep firm”

Q you attracting them? Uh, before this, you know, we, we started recording. You were talking about how you've been in back to back calls, doing consultations. Um, it's a wonderful kind of slug, but it is a lot of work. So you have a full pipeline of customers and people that are interested. Who are they? Who are you going after? And, um, how have you started to engage them?

A Yeah, so, um, we work with, you know, everything from Vanilla w two tiny nines. I'm just an employee at a company. I want somebody to be able to call in the off season for questions all the way through call it like series B and series C companies with, you know, deeply sophisticated entities that all own parts of each other. And they need, you know, like, you know, 300,000 R and D credit done along with, you know, 35 state returns. Um, Kyle is a machine. I'm very lucky to get to work with him. There will be many more tax preparers behind the curtain soon, we hope. Um, but, uh, we, we work with anybody who is eager and ready to work with us and is responsive, right? Our best clients are the ones that answer our emails quickly when we need more information and have work for us to do. Uh, we picked either the best or the worst time to start this business is in the middle of tax prep season. Um, Not entirely sure. I, I think we could have used a couple months to sort of like get ready for January, but, uh, we're off to the races nonetheless. And, um, you know, it's, it's people who need help. Yeah. I, I love this question. I get this question a handful of times from actual clients. Like, oh, who's your target customer? Like you're a client. I love that the industry has trained people to think that they need to be an accounting firm's target customer in order for them to be willing …

AI assessment note: “we work with, you know, everything from Vanilla w two”